What is arxiv.org

arXiv.org is a worldwide, open-access preprint server. It is the primary means of scholarly communication in many subfields of physics. It also serves preprints in mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, and some other subjects. Begun in 1991, by 2015, its preprint collection had more than one million articles[1].

Why should ConTeXt users care about this page?

http://arxiv.org uses plain TeX or LaTeX as the preferred source format for
submitting documents. When you request PDF, PS, or DVI format, the
system, which now (April 2007) runs a modified teTeX 3 distribution,
generates it automatically from the source.

But the system does not run ConTeXt in the same automatic way. So you
have to generate the PS format yourself and submit that. If that were
the whole story, you'd be done. However, you would like the benefit
of arxiving, sorry archiving the source code that plain TeX or LaTeX
users get. So you need a way to submit the source code along with
your PS file, in a way that the arxiv.org automatic system does not
reject.

You can imagine that with 500,000 or so documents, with thousands
added every month, that the submission process has to be as automatic
as possible in order to keep the costs per article low. And the low
per-paper cost, one or two orders of magnitude lower than the cost of
traditional journals, allows the system to provide the articles for
free.

So this page describes how to submit your ConTeXt document along with
its source.

Quickstart

For the impatient, look at http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0704.1854
containing a working example. It is licensed under the GNU GPL
free-software license, so you can use it as a basis for your own
submission.

Otherwise, here are the details.

Why PostScript?

The arxiv.org system will accept a PDF file but only unaccompanied.
So for now you cannot submit a PDF file along with the source.
Instead, you need to submit PS. The PS-submission subsystem does
accept other files, ideally placed in a subdirectory.

The admins say that this situation is an oddity in their system, but
not one that they can fix easily or soon (except, I suppose, by making
the PS submission be like the PDF one!).

Prepare the PostScript

Write your document! Let's say that it's called document.tex and uses
two EPS figures generated from the MetaPost file fig.mp. Generate
document.ps using

The -o is to work around stupid dvips configurations that send the
output to lpr by default.

The arxiv.org system will automatically generate PDF from the PS using
ghostscript, so test that ps2pdf (a wrapper around ghostscript) on
document.ps produces a working PDF file.

View document.ps to check that any TeX-generated labels in the
MetaPost figures come out in the correct font. If they look like
Courier, then the font embedding isn't right. The -Ppdf is to make
sure that the correct fonts are embedded into the PS file, but if that
didn't work, ask for help on the mailing list!

Prepare the upload file

Make a directory src/ with document.tex and fig.mp. Then make a .tgz
file for uploading. I usually call it arxiv.tgz. It is produced from
this file structure:

document.ps
src/
fig.mp
document.tex

The command to produce the tgz file:

tar -czvf arxiv.tgz document.ps src/

Upload!

If all is well, upload arxiv.tgz as your submission using the usual
arxiv.org submission or replacement procedure. Ideally you'll do step
4 an hour before the 4pm (US Eastern) weekday deadline, so that you
get back in time the submission date and preprint number from
arxiv.org for step 5. Then you have time for the next steps.

Incorporate the date and preprint number

Incorporate the preprint number (or URL) and submission date into your
document and produce an arxiv stampline along the left margin on the first page. Then remake
document.ps and arxiv.tgz, and replace the previous submission
with the new arxiv.tgz. This stampline is most easily placed using layers, and
the http://www.arxiv.org/abs/0704.1854 document is an example.

For automatically processed source formats (plain TeX and LaTeX), you
can avoid this incorporation step by using magic strings in the source
file, and the automatic system will translate those into the preprint
number and date. However, we as ConTeXt users are (with these
directions) faking the behavior of that system, so we get the info
ourselves and incorporate it.

Check that all is well

Check that the PS and PDF look fine. For example, check that the
fonts in the MetaPost figures look right.

Then sit back and relax, knowing that you've contributed to the
open-access commons.